News

Alright, the website for right now has been put on hold until I get caught up on some of my classwork. The layout has been completed in Photoshop and all thats left is the coding which should be done easily enough using Dreamweaver and notepad. The main page has been started and is beginning to resemble the Photoshop image, but the hard part is getting the time to get it done while trying to get access to Dreamweaver.

As for how work is going at Zeek's overall, it is going well. The owner bought several ASUS motherboards and installed one on a new business machine. After installing XP Pro, he ran Microsoft updates and left it to finish. He noticed it had stopped halfway through and it appeared he no longer had a connection. He rebooted the machine and tried it again with the same results. I opened cmd and used ipconfig /release then ipconfig /renew with no success. We opened a PCI NIC and installed it and it downloaded everything with no problems. I did a Google search and found forum after forum mentioning that the motherboards had a flaw that caused the onboard NIC to stop working after periods of time. We went to the ASUS driver site to download the latest BIOS, there were two. One was the current released BIOS from February of 2008, and another that was a Beta released just two days ago. Dave decided to go with the February BIOS and he flashed the BIOS. We removwed the PCI NIC and I found a couple 100+ MB music files to download and test if the NIC was fixed. It stopped downloading halfway through. He decided to just give the purchaser a PCI NIC for free when I asked him if we could try the Beta BIOS. He saw nothing to lose and he flashed the motherboard with the Beta BIOS, and were able to download two different music 100+ MB music files. We then pushed it further and downloaded Vista SP1 and another 1GB file, both were downloaded with no problems. He saved $31 on the sale which means he saved $217 for the other 7 motherboards he purchased.

I've also introduced him to some free software, PC Wizard 2008, that has helped reduce the amount of time searching for what hardware and drivers are installed on a computer. PC Wizard is a program that gathers all the information about a computer and presents it to the user. HWMonitor is also being used to monitor the processor and video cards temperatures on a computer that has its CPU and graphics cards overclocked. CPUZ is being used as a quick way to find the motherboard model to obtain the lastest BIOS updates. These are all programs that I've introduced into the shop that the owner did not know about, and has received well.